Yesterday I downloaded Mint 14 (MATE). When I tried to install it on my Acer Aspire One D270 Netbook, it couldn't load the live system because X "can't find (the) screens". When I plugged in an additional screen I got the same picture on both screens but it worked. After the installation, however, I got the same mistake again but this time, the workaround with the the external screen does not work. The system loads but without starting X.

Has anyone come across a similar problem and/or can tell me what to do (besides of getting back to Mint 13 )

I had the same problem with many distros, including Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu 12.10. As much as i have read about Aspire D270 its graphics Driver is not well supported in Linux world, however I am now using LMDE 2012-4 and happy with it, even without updating its packages since once I tried to update its xserver.xorg and it failed the way you already mentioned, no X!

I can add to this, but I don't have much tech. knowledge, so the vocab may be off, and I can't offer a solution, just an experience. I'm hoping someone else can make use of it and let me know what's happening. I have an Acer Aspire D270 as well. I am keeping that as built, but for some while I have run LMDE from a partition on an external HDD. I have put Mint 14 on my old netbook A110L and liked the way it looked and ran, so I decided to replace LMDE on the USB HDD with 14 as well. When LMDE boots up on the d270 there is something about the fonts that looks a bit 'soft'.

Booting a 'live cd' on a usb stick is no problem. Everything comes up and looks great; crystal clear and sharp desktop. I can run the install to the external HDD without issue, but when I restart and boot from the external HDD I just about see the splash and the boot process then reports a problem with running X-server and suggests that its not configured properly. How did I manage to boot with no problems from the USB live cd stick?

I have tried re-booting from the external HDD a few times and get the same problem. I have then run the boot in recovery mode, selecting the option to fix or re-write grub? (sorry, not looking at that screen at the moment). A bit of processing goes on and then the D270 seems to hang. If I now force power off and re-boot from the external HDD (not in recovery mode), Mint 14 starts up fine. The Gui is snappy and I can get all the latest updates installed.

If I shut down and restart again from the external hdd, I'm back to square one, no x-server. Does that help anyone? If you have any ideas, I'd be eternally grateful.

Although the intel website explicitly talks only about N2800 CPUs but the puppy linux page also addresses the issue with Aspire D270 netbooks (if I am not wrong N2600's GPUs are also GMA3600?). Does this news open any hope for us to see the driver packaged in Mint in a near future?

PS. I have not checked that puppy linux yet to see if it works well on my AOD270 machine or not.